Technically, it's still not out. The free download sample is a fully functional version Adobe's calling a public beta or a public preview, yielding a rare sneak peek of a future Acrobat version before it hits the street.

Rak Bhalla, senior marketing manager for Adobe's Knowledge Worker Business Unit, says that the company put out the new Acrobat 3D preview as a combination sales demo and development tool, just to see what feedback they'd get after the market—primarily manufacturing engineers with some architects and technical writers sprinkled in—"banged on the product" and "stress-tested it" for a while.

"We wanted to get feedback from everyone, and include everyone in the review cycle," Bhalla says. "We are actively engaged with our customers, so it's not that we're learning how to develop the product. We talk to supply-chain customers, small two-man shops, large OEMs in aerospace and automotive on a constant basis—we sit with them and hash out features. That's what the beta program's about. The public preview is to expose more people to the product. We want their feedback, but it's not a key R&D initiative."

What took them so long?

The reasons the release of the new Acrobat 3D version lagged behind the other Acrobat 8 versions that came out late last year are threefold, Bhalla says: First, the inaugural Acrobat 3D—version 7—just came out in January 2006, and Adobe wanted to put some space between the two releases.

Secondly, it took time to integrate code from Trade and Technologies France, a software company from which Adobe had licensed CAD-conversion features for version 7 of Acrobat 3D that worked well enough that Adobe went ahead and acquired the whole company last April. Lastly, Adobe sought feedback from many large and small customers, and it took some time to incorporate their requests into Acrobat 3D.

Users who might be expecting special Flash capabilities in Acrobat 3D will have to wait. While Acrobat 3D 8 can integrate animations, there's nothing more in the 3D version than in Acrobat Pro 8. Down the road, those engineers will likely be able to make their illustrations do more tricks in PDF with the aid of Flash.

But for now, Adobe is focusing on conversion of CAD data, compression of fat proprietary files into thin PDFs, and the fact that everyone in the world seemingly has Reader installed on their machines and will be able to view designs rendered in native CAD apps but fried to PDF in Acrobat 3D.

"Customers will now be able to include very precise CAD data inside PDFs," says Bhalla, who added that the final release version should come out later this spring, bearing the same $995 price of the previous edition. "By leveraging some compression technologies from TTF, these PDF files will be highly compact, easily transmittable by email."

While it's always possible to wow viewers in a demo with smoke and mirrors, in Adobe's demo of the new app they take a 60MB application file featuring complex renderings of an automotive brake assembly and convincingly smash it down to about 300K in Acrobat 3D.

Practical applications of Acrobat 3D

For engineers, other main takeaways are that:

Designs can be "locked down" in PDF and harder for plagiarists to reverse-engineer and steal trade secrets—especially when an Acrobat 3D document is rights-managed through Livecycle Policy Server
• Engineers sending a file out for design feedback among customers, manufacturers, and other stakeholders can initiate commenting cycles just like Acrobat Pro users, activating features in Adobe Reader that allow for the collection and collating of their feedback in a quick, automated fashion
• Non-engineers who need to see 3D renderings of parts and other designs don't need the original application or a proprietary viewer to view PDFs, they just open in Reader (version 7 or later)
• For proposals and bidding in the private and government manufacturing sectors, PDF offers an electronic document format that supports text, forms, and complex 3D renderings in one package

For the rest of us, Acrobat 3D users represent a pretty exclusive club: Bhalla doesn't see a lot of consumer uses for 3D PDFs for now, but possibly down the road they could become more common. Technical writers and marketing staff already are paving the way by publishing documents that combine text and 3D renderings, perhaps the forerunners of a cool new genre of instruction and assembly manuals for consumer products.

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